A more minimalist rendering of an Asiatic lily

[DanK]

This is the same flower I posted a few days ago, but I shot it much closer to get only the filaments, anthers, and stigma. This is 12 shots, 2 seconds @ f/8, stacked in Zerene with PMax to lessen haloing.

C&C always welcome.

[ShaneS]

The patience of a saint is something that I sorely lack and that is what it must have take to create this shot! Nicely done Dan and even though I can't comment on the technicalities I like it a lot

BTW I see s alight bit of banding on the background in the lower right but I'm not sure if it is my monitor.

[ied]

I love the simplicity - beautiful.
as for the technique... way over my head.

Irene

[Brownbear]

Exceptionally beautiful, as all of your flower images are.

[chauncey]

Dan, stellar shot and results are suburb. You avoided being klutzy and dislodging pollen, unlike some of mine. Lighting...what did you use and, why f/8?

[DanK]

Thanks, all. Chauncy, I use two cheap "hair lights" (boom lights to illuminate the tops of people's heads in portrait photrogaphy), with halogen floods. I either use diffusers (baking parchment paper works fine) or reflect off an umbrella. Here is a shot a year or two ago:



I now more often use a small silver reflective umbrella. I like doing it with this kind of lighting because you can move the lights around and get a pretty good notion of what the lighting will look like even before shooting. The disadvantage is that it requires long shutter times, which in turn means being very still during each shot, because it doesn't take much to make a flower move. I use mirror lock-up and a remote release.

I generally shoot these around f/8 because I am guessing at how much to change the focus between shots, and so I don't want the shallow DOF a wider aperture would give. If you miss one shot in the stack, the whole thing has to be done over. I don't shoot much narrower to avoid diffraction. f/8 seems like a reasonable compromise.

Shane--re the banding: thanks for pointing this out. I have no idea how this happened. I selected the black areas in photoshop and zeroed them out with a levels adjustment, so it shouldn't be there, and it's not present in the edited image on my computer. However, it does show up in Smugmug. I normally upload to Smugmug and link from there. I will write them to ask what is going on.

Dan

[Stagecoach]

Excellent stack Dan and the final result helped by having a pristine subject.

[Shadowman]

Very crisp, nicely captured.

[teokf]

I love the image!

[IzzieK]

I love the image and the technique used with it...I am not just into flower shots...but this one is beautiful enough to merit this kind of shot. Excellent as always...

[Wavelength]

My hearty admiration

[bnnrcn]

Very nice image

[FrankMi]

Shane--re the banding: thanks for pointing this out. I have no idea how this happened. I selected the black areas in photoshop and zeroed them out with a levels adjustment, so it shouldn't be there, and it's not present in the edited image on my computer. However, it does show up in Smugmug. I normally upload to Smugmug and link from there. I will write them to ask what is going on.

You can get banding in areas like this if there is the slightest change in color. As you did this with the levels adjustment it may not have set all the pixels to R=0,G=0,B=0. Try checking several points in the suspected area with the Color Sampler Tool.

If you see R,G,B values other than '0', then you don't have a true black and banding can occur where the numbers change value. If you DO see 0,0,0 in all locations, then perhaps SmugMug is introducing the change in values. I suspect that the image rendering in SmugMug is sensitive to the variance in the pixel color values of your PP image.

One way to avoid banding in this situation is to mask the subject and use a new background layer that is filled (Edit, Fill: Black) with black. Now when you sample the background it should give you 0,0,0 for the R,G,B values everywhere in the background.

[DanK]

Frank,

Thanks for the suggestion, but that is not the problem. The background was virtually black to begin with; I just used levels to take care of a few places where it was slightly gray. (It's a black fleece that shows up gray if it is too directly illuminated.) The PSD file and a jpeg I exported to disk are free of the problem, and the color sampler returns 0,0,0 everywhere I checked in the jpeg. The problem seems to be something new at the Smugug site. I've uploaded lots of flowers with black backgrounds before without this problem. Their tech people have seen both the version on their site and my jpeg and are trying to track down the bug.

However, it's a valuable suggestion to keep in mind for other problems that look like this.

Dan

Dan

[FrankMi]

Thanks Dan. Please post the results of what you find out from SmugMug as I use it as well but haven't seen this issue there, yet.

[TonyW]

Nice image. I cannot see any banding. When I downloaded the file and opened it in Photoshop, the colour sampler gave values of 0,1,0 or 0,0,0 for red, green, blue respectively. The black therefore does vary but not visibly, to me at least.